Through Kingdom Eyes

By Jim Van Rite

I started to write this book in my thirties and couldn't put it together. I was too much about me in those days, and as I say in the book, I was unable to access my feelings. I had an epiphany moment in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when I saw in my imagination a little airplane pulling a banner that said Surrender. I had never surrendered entirely even to God, and this after having been a United Methodist minister for ten years.

I was frightened at the prospect of losing myself, and I remembered how I had fought that very thing in my just-failed marriage. If I could just have stopped protecting myself from her needs, then I could have seen the hurt that she carried in her, and I would have been doing love by listening to her instead of pulling away. Instead, when God showed me that surrender to such a path was the way to gaining access to my feelings, and really better access to him, I was too frightened to risk it.

This book is about a wondrous truth that God has revealed to me over the decades since those times. He showed me that we are eternal spiritual beings and that we live in the kingdom of God in the here and now. He showed me that the kingdom of God is the true fabric of reality, and the world of darkness that we walk around in is unable to fulfill the spiritual needs that God has instilled in us.

We are made to love as he loves us. We are made to show others the grace that he shows us. We are made to forgive and not to hold grudges and judge others.

God is being, and we are being made of him. The forever kingdom of God is meant to be manifested in what we call the here and now, through us. The sweet bye-and-bye is just a transition from one part of eternity to another. This part of eternity is meant to be changed by us as Jesus calls for in the Lord's Prayer ("thy will be done on earth as in heaven").

We are the spiritual agents meant to change the world. We must see it first and thus Through Kingdom Eyes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685265205

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Through Kingdom Eyes

Jim Van Rite

ISBN 978-1-68526-519-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68526-520-5 (Digital)

Copyright © 2022 Jim Van Rite

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Profile

Beginning and Thesis

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Epilogue

Conclusion

About the Author

Profile

Jim Van Rite

I am an ordained United Methodist elder (retired). My BS degree is from Texas Wesleyan University (then Texas Wesleyan College), and my MDiv is from Brite Divinity School at TCU.

My book is about my spiritual development and how I came to understand that the kingdom of God is not only promised in this world, but that we are commanded to come to God in love, as Jesus loves us.

My problem was that I didn't know how to love anyone, including myself. The book begins with me speaking of that.

Yet God clearly called me to ministry, and I just as clearly told him that a man unable to love had no place trying to be a pastor to his sheep.

I spent ten years as a full time UMC pastor, with some success, but my family was in disarray. I chose to take honorable location while I would work out the family problems. Divorce came anyway, and I was out of the church professionally for twenty-five years. God never stopped moving in my life, and this book was always calling to me because of him.

As my second wife, Sue, and I got together, I began to teach Sunday school at St. Andrews UMC in Arlington, Texas. I call Sue Suzie, and both of us felt the hand of God in our meeting.

I had just learned that God would not point a celestial finger at me and make me love. Rather, I got the message that I would have to risk saying that word, and then I would have to do acts of love and kindness in order to begin to get the feelings.

I heard this as a tenant of AA, Feelings follow action, and I decided that if it worked for others, it just might work for me. It did.

We moved to Hurst, Texas, at a time when I felt a great need to surrender to God in a more complete way, and when I was offered the position of associate pastor at Martin UMC in Bedford, Texas, I took it.

I understood that spiritual growth would come through sharing in love with the congregants of that church and others.

My role there was teaching and visitation, as well as participating in the worship services.

Six years later, I retired again, and the love Suzie and I were showered with was just stupendous. I told folks there that I was neither right nor left in my understanding of the gospels, but that I was a seeker of spiritual closeness to God and his children. I said that spiritual growth came through, risking to love as much like Jesus as we could as we journeyed in him.

I made great strides in this direction, and for the first time since seminary, writing a book became possible. I knew and could share love, and others felt that also. I could write about Jesus's call to perfection as God is perfect and know that slowly the Holy Spirit was guiding me in that direction. I understood Paul speaking of working out our salvation in fear and trembling to mean truly giving up my will to God. It was something I had feared and fought for years, yet people at Martin saw me as loving, and I knew it was God and not me.

My professor of New Testament at Texas Wesleyan reappeared in my life at just this time, and he agreed to proofread the book and to help me put it in order.

A brief synopsis: in the Lord's Prayer, Jesus prays, Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. I take it seriously, that this means we Christians are called to help this to happen and to do it through offering love to others in the name of Jesus.

In John 9:39, Jesus says, I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.

In Luke 6:25, Jesus says that those who are laughing now will mourn, and Matthew 20:16 says, So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

As I understand these words and Jesus's call for us to be perfect as our Father in heaven is (Matthew 5:48) as a call to turn this world upside down, we are called to do the love he calls for as a commandment in John 13:34, and together this and his attention to the poor and dispossessed (Luke 4:18) tell us that our worldly values can never lead us to him. We put ourselves first in almost everything as a matter of survival. But Jesus calls us to put the kingdom first (Matthew 6:33) and that then we will see God. (Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God [Matthew 5:8].)

The inventor of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer wrote, Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I believe we are called to become love. This book is my journey into love and what I came to believe along the way. On my journey, I began to understand that the spiritual sightedness that Jesus speaks of in John 9:39 is about seeing the kingdom way of living now, i.e., kingdom eyes. Those who see or have their sight restored (as in Luke 4:18) see their lives and the responsibilities of living in a Christlike way as possible—even if still step by step.

Beginning and Thesis

God is serious about love. This is clear when we read the great commandment and Jesus's only commandment in John 13. Like I said, he is serious about love, and especially that we should learn to love as he loves us.

So it is my purpose in this book to explore how we should attempt to live in response to his clear call on us to love in this way, and along the way, I will share some of the reasons we find it hard to envision doing so.

Chapter 1

My Story, My Need for Kingdom Eyes

Childhood

I was about five years old and sitting in the back seat of a car driven by my aunt Margie. Mom was on the front passenger side, and my younger brother, Kent, and cousin Danny were in the back seat with me. Some sort of group conversation was going on, and I was expected to give a response, but I missed the cue. My mother said, as a broadcast to all in the car, Jimmy is always in a world of his own.

Years later, I heard my dad say that he was never lonely because his mind always kept him entertained. That was me, too, and in many ways, my mind is still going all of the time. Unfortunately, I got something else from my dad. Dad didn't really know how to express his feelings to others, and in fact, he didn't really know how to trust and love others very well. No doubt this came from living on his own with his brother when they were ten and twelve years old. His home wasn't safe, so they got an adult to rent an apartment in his name, which they then paid for from their employment as newsboys for the Shreveport Journal newspaper.

Our family was dysfunctional in the extreme; and yes, I withdrew and didn't get the love thing either.

In the third going into the fourth grade, I discovered the Tom Swift series of books, and then the Hardy Boys. And I read all of them that year. I was off and running, and I read all of the science fiction books in our small community library in the foreign staff colony in Aruba. By the end of the sixth grade, I was reading adult novels, such as The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglass and other Christian historical novels. Reading was my escape, and although I did have friends who, like me, were on the fringes of our childhood peer society, books kept me entertained more than anything else.

Young Adult

As an adult, I became more of a loner but was always looking for that perfect woman to make me feel okay. When I did get together with a new woman, I didn't have the emotional tools to keep the relationship growing, and so I would be a loner again.

Vietnam

Shortly after graduation from high school, I joined the US Marines. I served two separate tours: one from November 1960 to November 1963, and after a couple of years, I went back in to serve in Vietnam. On that second tour, from May 1965 to May 1968, I quickly found myself in Da Nang, Vietnam. I wasn't in a direct combat role there, so I had lots of time on my hand, and I spent that time in search of meaning in my life. I broke up my eighteen-month tour with several rest and relaxation weeks away but in the region, plus one back home, but that still left me with